02/10/2014
Food for thought for the growing mind. Please share and advocate for the wellness of your communities. SOTU
LITTLE KNOWN BLACK HISTORY FACT
The media made the Black Panthers notorious for their Afros, dark apparel, and willingness for armed self-defense, but their manifesto for change launched programs that benefited black communities nationwide, like free dental care, breakfast for low-income children, even drama classes
Before the US government gave breakfast at school, the program was initiated at St. Augustine’s Church in Oakland. By year’s end it spread to cities nationwide, feeding over 10,000 children every day before school.
Just months later J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, publicly stated the Panthers are the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country”,
…If you read the FBI files you will see that even J. Edgar Hoover himself had to say that it was not the guns that were the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States of America; it was not the guns, it was the Free Children’s Breakfast Program that was the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States of America. It was the Free Children’s Breakfast Program because the Free Children’s Breakfast Program engendered a certain following on the Black community’s part, a certain respect on the Black community’s part. I mean, nobody can argue with free grits. So Hoover saw it as a kind of…infiltration.
The Black Panthers were eventually opposed by the secret FBI operation COINTELPRO.
The "Breakfast for Children" program was effectively shut down by daily arrests of members; however, these charges were most often dropped within a week.
"The Breakfast for Children Program," wrote Hoover in an internal FBI memo in May 1969, "represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for."
Hoover submitted orders to FBI offices: "exploit all avenues of creating dissension within the ranks of the BPP," and "submit imaginative and hard-hitting counterintelligence measures aimed at crippling the BPP."
This, along with numerous other threats and acts of violence were made in an attempt to shut the party down.
~V~
Image: A Black Panther Party member peers from behind a door riddled with bullet holes next to a poster advertising the Panther’s free breakfast program for children.
